“You want me to pull it up on the surveillance?” As per Carter’s instructions, Sheppard and a small team of specialists had fitted the lab with a network of cameras, microphones, motion sensors and taps into all the computers Angelus would be using. He had boasted at the time that the Ancient wouldn’t be able to fold up a paper airplane without it being recorded. “Shouldn’t be too hard, what with him throwing you around like a sack of beans.”
“Something tells me you’re not taking this entirely seriously.”
Sheppard put his hands up. “Okay, okay. You just seem in pretty good shape after all this violence, that’s all. But I’ll get the recordings up, don’t worry.”
“I’d appreciate it. And yes, I’ll be going to see Keller after I’ve checked out this ship of his.” He stepped up to the door control and waved his hand across it. After a moment’s hesitation, the doors parted, slid aside with a thin, metallic scraping.
Beyond them lay the golden ship, the starhopper. Just as it had before, the sight of it stopped him cold.
The ship was side-on to him, facing away from the modular wall and at a slight angle, evidence of the rather imprecise method by which it had arrived in the tower. The hangar was probably about the same size as Apollo’s bomb bay, but somehow the ship had seemed smaller there. Here, it loomed, hunching slightly forwards, as though ready to leap away. The dim light of the hangar sparked off its strange curves and leant a glossy, organic sheen to the opaque domes at its prow, and the surface of it still shone with the subtle opulence that only brushed gold can lay claim to.
It looked like jewelry. No, McKay thought, wonderingly: it looked like a sleek, wingless insect, disguising itself as jewelry in order to get the drop on some unknown prey.
As McKay stood there, watching, Sheppard stopped next to him. “Really takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”
“No kidding.”
“Rodney, you said you couldn’t open this thing.”
“I think it’s under Angelus’ control. He said to Sam and I that he let me in, back on Apollo. I think, if he wants me in there now…”
As if in answer, part of the ship’s flank turned into a jigsaw of glittering panels and folded away to nothing.
“Okay,” said Sheppard. “That’s creepy.”
“I forgot, you’d not seen it do that.” McKay swallowed, then squared his shoulders. “Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Left it in my other pants.”
“Look, this might be the only chance I get to study this ship from the inside. Sam said we needed all the info we could get, right?” He set off towards the hopper. “And I’m damned if I’m going to set foot in this thing on my own, so get in gear!”
He had left his data tablet back at the lab, but he still had a PDA that he’d upgraded. He took it out of his jacket pocket and switched it on, setting the integral sensors to the broadest settings they could muster. He might not have long in the starhopper — only as long as Angelus let him stay, assuming he was right and that the vessel was directly under the Ancient’s control — and he was determined to gather as much data about the ship as he could in whatever time he was allowed.
“Want me to go in first?” Sheppard asked him as they reached the open hatch. McKay shook his head.
“Much as my self-preservation says yes, my self-esteem says no.” He peered inside, holding the PDA in front of him like a talisman. On its tiny screen, data began to accumulate. “Okay, let’s see… When I was in here last, on the Apollo, there was this —” He stopped, frowning into the gloom. “Hold on.”
“What?”
“It’s different. There was a kind of bulkhead on either side of the door.” McKay looked about, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom inside the hopper. Sure enough, not only could he see all the way to the control couch at the front of the ship, but the area that had been closed off to him before was now laid open too.
He climbed in, unsure of where to head first. The interior space of the vessel was shaped roughly like two elongated eggs, set end to end, with a cylindrical ‘waist’ where they joined. The smaller egg contained the cockpit — McKay could see the couch where he and Ellis had first seen Angelus, and beyond that the softly glowing panels of the control system. What lay in the larger aft section was more difficult to make out. The only light came from a double row of fist-sized jewels running along each side of the ship, pulsing faintly blue-green like the bioluminescent markings of some deep-sea fish. There was something taking up most of the hopper’s aft space, some kind of engine or power module, perhaps, but its outline was complex, jumbled. With the lack of light, he couldn’t really make out what it was he was seeing. “Sheppard? This mess at the back here? What does that look like to you?”
“What, that? Damn…” McKay saw him squint into the darkness. “From here, it looks like a bunch of gold-plated squid all trying to play the same trombone.”
“I meant, what do you think it is?”
“Well how the hell should I know? Engines? Look, you go check the squid band out, I’ll go up front.”
“Okay. Here, stash this somewhere, will you?” McKay handed him the visios, then began to clamber gingerly into the rear egg. Even if the tangle of metal in front of him hadn’t been taking up most of the hopper’s interior, the vessel would have been cramped. It was hard to see how Angelus could have spent much time there without a serious case of cabin fever.
“You know what’s weird?” he called back over his shoulder.
“What?”
“Well, you’ve seen Ancient technology before… Of course you have, we live in it… And okay, they built in a variety of styles, but they tended to follow a kind of basic pattern, right?”
“And none of this looks like Ancient tech, is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Kind of.”
“I guess. I mean, some of these controls, maybe… But you’re the expert.”
McKay nodded absently. “Yes, I am…” He held up the PDA, and watched it running through a series of basic scans. There was power in the ship, that much was obvious. Traces of heat, vibration, low-level energy output on a number of different bands. Nothing that was immediately surprising for a machine that was powered-down and left on standby. The emissions from a quiescent puddle jumper were not much different.
He put the PDA back in his pocket. It could work just as well from there.
For a few seconds he tried to get past the central mass and further back towards the rear of the hopper, but the space was too cramped. Even if he was as slim as Angelus, McKay decided, he’d not have been able to get back there without injury. Puzzled, he gave up on that idea, and decided to go back to the cockpit and see if anything there looked more familiar.
He turned. And froze, every hair on the back of his neck crawling to slow attention.
He was no longer alone in the aft section.
There had been no sound, no movement. The lights still pulsed in their soft, slow rhythm, their meager brightness rising and falling like moonlight on a sluggish sea. The interior of the starhopper was as cool and still and inanimate as it had been when he had first entered.
But McKay was being watched. He could feel it more certainly than he could feel his own hammering heart.
He tried to speak, but terror had robbed him of breath. Whatever was observing him was doing so with complete and utter malevolence, a cold rage and a hunger the like of which he had never even imagined. He was in this ship with something that was totally, utterly focused on his destruction.
“Sheppard,” he hissed.
“Hm?”
“We have to leave…” He couldn’t even blink. Every instinct screamed at him that to move was to die. “There’s… Something…”
Sheppard was rising off the couch. He must have been sitting there while he was studying the controls. “Already?”